Much of the history of the Nine Unknown
is hidden. One early incident from their history has recently come to light.
In the year 1233 the Chinese capital of Pien Liang (later known as Kaifeng)
was besieged and conquered by the invading Mongols of Ogadei Khan, the
son of Temujin, aka Genghis Khan. The loss of the capital spelled the end
of the Chin Empire, which was annexed by the Mongols. The last imperial
child at the time was the individual who would later become known as Monsieur
Ming. According to Ming he was present in the "Imperial City" when
the "Golden Horde" burned it. Pien Liang was never called the "Imperial
City," but we must assume that centuries of immortality have partially
clouded Ming's memories. Ming's family in Pien Liang, a century later,
would produce Chu Yüan-chang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty.

Ming, exiled from China, went to Tibet,
where he spent some time studying at the Monastery of the "Third Hand"
in Tibet; at the Monastery he learned a variety of skills and abilities.
From there he traveled to India, where he encountered a mysterious immortal
who brought him to "Aghhhhartha," an underground kingdom. Ming acquired
the secret of immortality from "Aghhhhartha," as well as some advanced
technology, and then left "Aghhhhartha." He disappears from the pages of
history after this, reappearing in the 20th century. (See the
1959 entry, below)

I believe Monsieur Ming was one of the
first known agents of the Nine Unknown. I believe that the Monastery of
the "Third Hand" was controlled by the Nine Unknown, and that they trained
Ming and then sent him to Agartha, the central base of Mr. Am's organisation,
as a mole. After Ming got as much as he could from Mr. Am's lamas, including
the secret of immortality, he left, perhaps returning to the Nine Unknown
or, more likely, setting off on his own, being unwilling to be anyone's
agent but his own.

Another of the earliest agents of the Nine
Unknown was likely the Old Man of the Mountain, the founder of the
Assassins cult. As Dr. Lofficier has pointed out in his excellent “Conspiracy”
article, the Assassins were linked with the assass, the Islamic soldier-monk
“guardians” or “protectors” of the Holy Land and keepers of much secret
occult knowledge; the scholar Arkon Daraul quotes scholars defining the
Arabic assasseen with “guardians of the secrets.” The Old Man of the Mountain,
Hasan ben Saba, was the leader of the Assassins. Dr. Lofficier links ben
Saba with the Templars, the Illuminati, and the modern conspiracy of the
Black Coats.

Dr. Lofficier did not, however, address
the fate of one of the off-shoots of the Assassins. With the fall of the
Templars the conspiracy went underground. But sects of the Assassins continued,
especially in the East. In the latter half of the 16th century
the Afghan warrior Abdul Dost, later the friend and companion of
the legendary Cossack warrior Khlit, clashed with an Afghan
branch of the Assassins and destroyed their mountain stronghold, along
with a man claiming to be the “Old Man of the Mountains.” This was not,
of course, the Old Man of the Mountains; like the Nine themselves, the
“Old Man of the Mountains” was a title that was handed down from individual
to individual over time.

The Nine Unknown do not enter into the
pages of history again until the 19th century, when, as more Westerners
began venturing into Eastern Asia, accounts of the Nine Unknown and of
their virtuous enemies begin to come to light.

In 1819 the British
explorer Jonathon Wrexham was exploring Central Asia when he discovered
evidence of a surviving Greek culture. Wrexham found the corpse of a man
he assumed was a Greek and returned to the West with evidence of what he'd
found.

In the 1820s the
Nine used one of their agents, "Master Janus," to attempt to sway the brilliant,
reclusive German nobleman Count Axel Auersburg. Master Janus attempted
to use Axel to attack and overthrow the German government, which would
spread chaos across Europe and serve the ends of the Nine Unknown. Axel,
for his own reasons, resisted Master Janus and eventually committed suicide,
in 1828. Master Janus left Europe, and although he is reported to have
died in 1870 his final fate is not truly known.

In 1830 a nameless British soldier discovered
“apergy,” a “repellant force” which works as an anti-gravity energy.
This soldier used apergy to construct a spaceship and travel into space,
where he had a variety of strange and marvelous adventures. He wrote a
diary of his adventures, and this manuscript was found in the South Pacific.
It is interesting to note that the British soldier, a diplomat and old
Indian hand, discovered “apergy” while in India. He was not an otherwise
brilliant man or a scientist, and the odds of such a man discovering an
anti-gravity substance are slim–unless he somehow came into contact with
either Mr. Am’s forces or the Nine Unknown. It is my guess that the soldier
was given the secret to apergy by the Nine Unknown or their agents, in
the hopes that the soldier would travel either to Mars, where he would
attract the hostile attention of the native Martians, or to somewhere like
Aldebaran, presumably to awaken the primal terror god Hastur, “He Who Must
Not Be Named.” The soldier did make it into space, but his adventures were
quite different from what the Nine Unknown must have hoped for him.

Sometime during the 1830s one William
Savage, an English magistrate in India, followed the urging of his
wife Mary and, in order stop the wife of William’s friend Gopal from committing
sati, went undercover and joined a group of Thuggees, the notorious “Deceivers”
and “Stranglers” who had terrorised the Indian countryside for generations
and may have been responsible for over a million murders. Savage became
a noted Thug leader, saved Gopal’s wife, and eventually helped destroy
the band. Savage’s account of his experience later fell into the hands
of the writer John Masters, who published the account in 1952. This is
of note for two reasons. The first is that we shall meet the Thuggees again,
and see that, like the Assassins who they so resemble, they are servants
of the Nine Unknown and the Old Ones, indicating a probable link between
them. The second reason is that William Savage was the maternal grandfather
of Colonel Richard Henry Savage, the adoptive father of Clark Savage, Sr,
thus making William Savage the maternal great-grandfather of Doc Savage.

In 1849 and in the years following, the
infamous pirate Sandokan terrorized the seas of Asia, including
the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, as part of his vendetta against the
British and Governor James Brooke of Labuan. During one of his trips Sandokan
ventured into the dreaded “Black Jungle” on the island of Raymangal in
the Ganges delta. There Sandokan and his associates discovered that the
Island was the home of one of the central temples of the Thuggee cult,
and that inside of the temple Kali herself was supposed (by the Thuggees)
to communicate with her Strangler faithful. As far as is known there is
no “Kali,” but the presence of the Nine Unknown and their agents is a verified
fact, and it is likely that these Thuggees knowingly or unknowingly worked
for the Nine Unknown and the creatures of the Plateau of Leng.

The next major event in this “unknown history”
of the subcontinent did not involve the Nine Unknown or Mr. Am and his
forces. Rather, the event sprang from the forces of history. In the latter
half of the 1850s the sepoys (native troops) of India were given new Enfield
rifles. The rumor quickly spread that the lubricated cartridges for the
Enfields contained a mixture of pigs’ and cows’ lard. The Hindus and Muslims
among the sepoys were insulted beyond measure by this rumor, which was
later shown to have some factual basis. This grave offense to their religious
sensibilities led to a violent uprising, which in turn spread to a country-wide
rebellion, the so-called “Indian Mutiny” of 1857-1858.

Three figures of some note took part in
this rebellion. The first was Kala Persad. Persad’s history before
the rebellion is obscure, and his actions during the Mutiny are unknown.
He is significant for two reasons. The first is that he seems to have been
one of the first sleeper agents contacted by Mr. Am’s forces and converted
to their cause. The second is that he eventually went to England, where
he helped the Englishman Mark Poignand gain some fame as a consulting detective.
Persad used this opportunity to act on the behalf of Mr. Am’s forces in
England. Between the Mutiny and his departure for England, in 1895, Persad
was the wise man for his village in the hills below Mahabuleshwar, in central
Maharashta state.

The second significant figure who warred
on the British was Dhondu Pant, better known as “Nana Sahib.” Sahib,
the adopted son of Baji Rao II, the last Maratha peshwa (prince), was one
of the leaders of the sepoys, and following their defeat was driven into
the hills of Nepal in 1859. He was thought to have died there, but as Jules
Verne has shown he survived to hound Colonel Edward Munro, the murderer
of his family and friends, in 1865 and 1866. Sahib figures into this account
in part because he is Indian and in part because of a vehicle that played
a part in his final battle with Munro. Munro, in 1865, toured across India
in the “Steam House,” a giant steam engine in the shape of an elephant.
Munro’s friend Banks, a Scots engineer, claimed to have built the Steam
House, but such a feat of construction was beyond that of even the canniest
engineer in the 1860s. It seems clear that Banks was fed information to
aid in its construction. My belief is that agents of the Nine Unknown gave
him this information, as the sight of a elephant-shaped steam engine trampling
across India, blithely piloted by Englishmen, would offend the sensibilities
of the native Indians, and perhaps spark another Mutiny. The Nine Unknown
partially achieved their goal, for Nana Sahib and Colonel Munro clashed,
leading to several deaths.

The third figure, and the most important
of the three, was Prince Dakkar, who later gained eternal infamy
as “Captain Nemo.” Dakkar’s personal history is sufficiently well known
that I see no reason to repeat it here. However, one aspect of his life
must be stressed: his association with the Thuggees.

As Dr. Rick Lai has shown in his excellent
“The Secret
History of Captain Nemo” article, Prince Dakkar was involved with a
Thuggee cult. Dr. Lai has also shown that the Thuggees had stolen scientific
information from the Nine Unknown, information which Prince Dakkar used
along with knowledge provided by the alien Capelleans (of which Dakkar
himself was a member) to build his super-submarine, the Nautilus.
However, my examination of the relevant documents has led me to a different
conclusion than the one Dr. Lai has drawn. I trust he will beg my indulgence
and forgive this fusty old scholar for his disagreement.

Prince Dakkar was a leader of a local Thuggee
cult, this is true. It is also a fact that the Nautilus was built with
technology from the Nine Unknown. However, the intentions of the individuals
involved is, I believe, different from Dr. Lai’s construction.

Prince Dakkar’s Thuggees were in the employ
of the Nine Unknown. Their goal was to spread chaos and misery, as a way
to encourage the worship of the Old Ones and to hasten their arrival on
Earth. They conspired to do this by giving the vengeful Prince Dakkar the
technology to build his submarine, knowing that Dakkar would sink ships
with abandon and spread terror across the surface world. Dakkar discovered
this fact and divorced himself from the Thuggees, killing his former compatriots,
and began his war on civilisation with a new crew. Dakkar did not wish
to be indebted to the Nine Unknown or the Thuggees, preferring to be an
independent agent of vengeance, rather than the tool of hostile alien masters.

At some point before or during the early
1860s the infamous arch-villain Fu Manchu entered the Tibetan monastery
of Rache Churan (otherwise known as the "Lama College" and "the Monastery
of Fear") along with with several of his operatives. The monastery, for
those unfamiliar iwth the more obscure facts of the unknown history of
the world, the monastery is devoted solely In the monastery they learned
several secrets, including that of "animal magnetism." While it is theoretically
possible that Fu Manchu could have fooled Mr. Am's lamas into teaching
him this ability, it seems far more likely that the agents of the Nine
Unknown, seeing what Fu Manchu was capable of, happily taught him how to
mesmerize a human against their will and then sent him out into the world
to do harm and spread chaos and misery. The monastery of Rache Churan,
after all, also taught the Cantonese mandarin Ki-Ming, and the British
agent Nayland Smith relayed a story of his use of animal magnetism for
murder. I believe that the "Lama College" of Rache Churan was a Nine Unknown
operation. It is also at least possible that Fu Manchu may have learned
elements of the Nine's advanced science while at Rache Churan as well as
elements of their immortality formula.

In 1865 the notorious French rogue Rocambole
escaped from the prison at Toulon. He did not continue his murderous ways,
however, but instead underwent a conversion from evil to good, and began
fighting for humanity rather than preying on it. As part of his quest to
become a force for good, he journeyed to the East and visited India and
Tibet. What happened there, in 1865 and 1866, is not known in detail, but
the broad outlines are clear. Rocambole visited at least one temple or
lamasery run by agents of Mr. Am’s lamas. They spoke with Rocambole and
saw that his conversion was genuine and that he now wanted to help people.
Encouraged by this, they taught him certain skills, physical and mental.
Rocambole became the first Westerner to travel to the East and be taught
by Mr. Am’s lamas. (Rocambole was far from the last Westerner to do this,
however, as we shall see) Rocambole, for his part, used these skills to
help people, but when the opportunity presented itself he was not above
warring on the agents of the Nine Unknown, as seen in his destruction of
a group of Kali-worshiping Thugs.

Over the next decade India, Nepal, and
Tibet saw no major clashes between the forces of the Nine Unknown and that
of Mr. Am. However, a number of extraordinary (if relatively normal) children
had adventures of minor sorts in India during those years, leading modern
scholars to wonder if they might somehow have been influenced by agents
of Mr. Am. As Francis Hodgson Burnett, Mrs. Elisabeth Anne Hart, and Flora
M. Shaw wrote, Sara Crewe, Olga Leslie, and Winnie and
Murtagh Blair (respectively) all were very mature and adventurous for
their ages, and all spent time in India during these years.

Sometime in 1875 or 1876 an infant was
lost in the Indian jungle, separated from his parents by a wolf attack.
The infant was raised by wolves and grew into a kind of ruler of the Indian
jungle, the killer of the dreaded man-eating tiger Shere Khan and a man
capable of communicating equally with wolf and Man. This individual, called
“Mowgli” by his biographer, Rudyard Kipling, will strike most readers
as being quite similar to Lord Greystoke. However, Lord Greystoke was raised
by a tribe of the mangani, that exceptionally intelligent group
of African primates. Mowgli was not raised by primates, but rather by wolves,
if Kipling is to be believed. (According to some reports Kipling spoke
with Mowgli himself during his time in India) There is no evidence of a
lupine equivalent of the mangani. While there is at least one example
of a man raised by a non-primate and becoming intelligent–David “Ka-Zar”
Rand, raised by Panthera leo spelaee, a cave lion, as detailed in the “Secret
Wars” article–this does not seem to apply to Mowgli. There is substantial
evidence that cave lions of the type that raised David Rand survived into
the modern era, but there is no evidence that comparable wolves, whether
the Canis dirus, dire wolves, or the dog-like bone-crusher Osteoborus,
survived the coming of homo sapiens sapiens.

The conclusion, then, must be that either
Mowgli did not exist–a conclusion not supportable due to the great deal
of evidence to the contrary–or that something else raised Mowgli. It is
my contention that the “wolves” that raised Mowgli were either mental illusions
cast by agents of Mr. Am’s lamas, or were actual wolves altered by Mr.
Am’s forces and made into something much greater than an ordinary wolf.

The 1880s were for the most part quiet
in India, at least in terms of the duel between the Nine Unknown and Mr.
Am. In 1885 the English adventurer Tom Wildrake clashed with
a group of Thuggees in India. The decade also saw the duel, chronicled
by Rudyard Kipling, between British/Indian security forces and the enemies
of Britain. Kim O’Hara, an orphan of Irish extraction, was involved
in this duel, and came into contact–not coincidentally, I believe–with
a Tibetan lama. I believe this lama to be in the employ of Mr. Am, working
to secure peace, if not justice, for the area.

In Tibet, however, in 1880, a fraudulent
Tibetan mystic named Dorje (Tibetan for “thunderbolt”) discovered
an underground city in the Gobi desert in Mongolia. This underground city,
full of incredibly advanced and esoteric technology, was a central base
for the Nine Unknown, and its discovery by Dorje would prove momentous
in a few decades.

During the 1880s, in a remote, mountainous
section of Mongolia the “Hellenes,” a Greek branch of the Nine Unknown,
were discovered by Western travelers mere weeks before the local Mongolian
and Chinese tribes, oppressed by the Hellenes and their Nine Unknown-provided
science, rose up and slaughtered the Hellenes. These
"Hellenes" were the "Greeks" which Jonathon Wrexham had discovered in 1819.
The
noted classicist G.G.A. Murray, after speaking with the Western travelers
about the Hellenes, wrote about them but felt the need to obscure and conceal
some of the ugly facts of the Hellenes, but he let slip just enough of
the facts of the matter to show that the Hellenes were not, in fact, heroic.

Sometime during
the mid-1880s a man was born who play a small but crucial role in one of
the major defeats of the Nine Unknown. Somewhere in India Chullunder Ghose
was born during these years. Although much of his life's story remains
unknown, we can deduce from various accounts involving him that he was
at least familiar with Mr. Am's organisation and goals, although he was
far too cunning and wily to be a full-fledged believer. His knowledge of
(and, I believe, surreptitious use of) the Akashic Record would seem to
indicate his familiarity with Mr. Am's organisation and the "White Lodge"
(see 1926, below).

The 1890s saw the beginning of a new phase
of events, in which the war between the Nine Unknown and Mr. Am became
more active and violent, moving from “cold” to “hot.”

In 1891 Sherlock Holmes, believed
dead by the world following the events at the Reichenbach Falls, visited
several monasteries in Tibet in the guise of a Norwegian by the name of
“Sigerson.” In 1892 he visited India and became embroiled in the “Great
Game.” It is likely that during his months in the Far East he came into
contact with lamas who were agents of Mr. Am; an intellect as piercing
and well-informed as Holmes’ could hardly have been unaware of the presence
of the Nine Unknown or of their enemies. What Holmes learned from Mr. Am’s
lamas is a subject that will be addressed below.

In 1892 George Wylde, an American traveling
for pleasure in Cambodia, encountered a being calling himself “Mirrikh”
and claiming to be from Mars. Wylde accompanied Mirrikh to a lamasery in
Tibet and discovered that various other Martians had been projecting their
spirits to Earth and using human corpses as their hosts. A novel based
on these events was written by Francis W. Doughty and published that same
year, but Doughty (perhaps, like Robert W. Chambers after him, reluctant
to reveal the truth about the Martians) concealed certain facts about Mirrikh
and the Martians. The truth is that the Martians, reeling from the attacks
on their system by the Earthman John Carter and from other contacts with
humanity, decided to retaliate, and began sending operatives to Earth using
the same method of spirit projection that John Carter had previously used
and which Robert Darvil (see below) would later use. This is a clear precursor
to the more open hostilities of 1898.

Then, in 1894, a good man, a fighter for
human rights, justice, and democracy, was the victim of a merciless attack
by a group of Russians. The Russians had aimed to take over the world,
but the man, a German-American engineer, had refused to help them and threatened
to expose them. These men went to the engineer’s farm, in a remote valley
in the Georgian mountains, and slaughtered the man’s family and burned
his farm. They did not kill the man, however, who was away from the farm
at the time; he returned later that night and saw the farm burning but
was too late to save his wife and children. As he later said, however,
“one thing they could not take from me–my genius and my knowledge.” The
man assumed the identity of the masked warrior “Captain Mors” and
began planning his vengeance on those who had killed his family, a vengeance
which, like Prince Dakkar’s, soon grew to encompass the rest of the world.

The rest of Mors’ story is relatively well
known. He built a powerful airship and later an even more powerful spaceship,
assembled a multinational crew, and beginning in the mid-1890s terrorised
the rest of the world before venturing into space. In 1905, under the name
of “Doctor Omega,” he traveled into space again, and in 1919 Mors
met with the American adventurer Elijah Snow, as described in the “Secret
Wars” article.

However, the construction of Mors’ ship
has not been given much attention. While Mors was an undoubtedly brilliant
man, the mysterious science behind his ships and the energies which fueled
them were, I think, beyond even his abilities to create without assistance.
I believe that Mors, in the months following the death of his family, traveled
and came into contact with agents of Mr. Am’s lamas. They gave him scientific
information which he used to build his ships. In an almost unprecedented
move they also loaned him men who were agents of Mr. Am’s forces. The crew
of Mors’ ships, as has been pointed out, was multi-ethnic in composition,
and Mors’ lieutenant was a soft-spoken and extremely capable Indian. I
believe that the Indians on Mors’ ships were agents of Mr. Am, working
with Captain Mors to see that justice was done and that Earth was protected
against the efforts of the Nine Unknown and the extra-planetary agents
and creatures of the Old Ones.

In 1895 the notorious global criminal Dr.
Nikola began his attempts to conquer the world. Nikola’s career is
fairly well-known, so I will not repeat it here; for those curious about
this fascinating man, I will direct you to Dr. Lai’s excellent “Life
of Dr. Antonio Nikola” article. While I obviously cannot quibble with
Dr. Lai’s research, I do feel the need to include some information which
Dr. Lai omitted.

Dr. Nikola, as Dr. Lai notes, learned a
variety of mental powers, including hypnosis, somewhere in the “Far East.”
He is an extremely advanced scientist who has the secret of eternal life.
He dresses as a “native of North India,” according to one witness. Near
the end of the first phase of his career he retires to a monastery in Tibet,
a “retirement” that was far from permanent. Notwithstanding his great intelligence
and abilities as a scientist, I do not believe it entirely creditable that
Nikola could have achieved what he did, and found the secret of eternal
life, without any outside help.

It is my guess that Nikola, at some point
in his past, had studied at a lamasery or lamaseries operated by either
the Nine Unknown or Mr. Am’s forces. At these lamaseries Nikola learned
elements of advanced knowledge, enough so that he could continue his studies
independently. I believe, though, that Nikola was a renegade. Nikola’s
later actions do not indicate a desire to aid the cause of the Old Ones,
as he seems to have worked only to empower himself, rather than the space
gods. Likewise, Nikola’s later actions, which involved the potential and
real deaths of many other men and women, are hardly in line with the goals
of Mr. Am. As both the Nine Unknown and Mr. Am’s organisation were in possession
of the elixir of immortality which Nikola stole, he could easily have come
from either organisation.

In 1896 a strange figure came to the attention
of the British public. An individual calling himself "Ozmar the Mystic"
was involved in the restoration of Prince Loris of Rivania, a small Central
European monarchy, to his throne. Ozmar, a mysterious figure, claimed to
be an initiate "of the Higher Grades of Buddhism" and displayed a variety
of mental powers. Ozmar also exhibited a familiarity with the Bedouin and
claimed to be one of only four living Initiates at his level. I believe
that Ozmar, a Westerner of noble background, was a product of Mr. Am's
lamaseries and was sent to the West to carry on the war against the Nine
Unknown.

On December 31, 1899, a group of Old Ones
cultists in the American Mid-West attempted to summon one of the Old Ones
by sacrificing two newborn infants. This attempt failed, but it drew the
notice of one of Mr. Am's lamas, who used his powers to teleport to the
cultists and rescue the two infants. The children were taken by the lama,
who may have been Ozmar the Mystic, and brought to one of Mr. Am's lamaseries,
the "Citadel of the Seven." The children were then raised to fight crime,
as living weapons. Towards this end they were given powers, as so many
other individuals were, by the lamas of the "Seven." By the early 1930s
one of the children, a boy named Richard, was ready to leave the lamasery
and return to the West. He took up residence in New York and gained fame
as Doctor Occult, an occult and psychic detective. DC Comics later
fictionalised his adventures, including one particularly interesting elision.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Doctor Occult's biographer, named the being
that the cultists were attempting to summon. They called him "Koth." Perhaps
Siegel and Shuster were aware of the facts of the matter, or perhaps they
stumbled upon the name by coincidence, but the truth is that the actual
name of the being in question only begins with "Koth." Its actual name
can be pronounced as "Koth-ul-hu."